As Theresa May would put it, I am not making this up. The Guardian reports that: One of the companies contracted by the government to charter ferries in the event of a no-deal Brexit does not own any ships, has not previously operated a ferry service and is not planning to do so until close to the UK's scheduled departure date from the European Union, it has emerged. Concerns have been raised about Seaborne Freight, which was awarded a £13.8m contract to operate freight ferries from Ramsgate to the Belgian port of Ostend if the UK leaves the EU without ...

You'd been wondering where I'd gotten to, hadn't you? Well, following some consideration of how this regular feature works, I've decided to change it a bit. From now on, I'll publish on Monday to Thursday inclusive, and on Sunday evening. My thinking is that politics goes a bit quiet when Parliament isn't sitting, and one can develop a false expectation as to the flow of press releases from that. And now, a catch up of press releases you've probably missed... Lib Dem call to scrap Vagrancy Act gets Labour backing Cable: Corbyn offers no real alternative Govt must take no ...

Today's Observer reports that: Tory education reforms are giving private school pupils a huge additional advantage in the hunt for university places and jobs by allowing them to sit easier GCSEs than the more rigorous exams that are being forced upon state schools, new official figures suggest.If this is the case, then universities must take it into account by demanding grades from prospective students from private schools than they do for state schools. I have long suspected that A level grades are as much a measure of social background and the school attended as they are a measure of academic ...

October The month began with my MP (a Tory) fearing that the Conservative Party could go out of business. An enticing prospect. Then I learnt that the employees of this blog's hero J.W. "Paddy" Logan had once tried their hand at archaeology at Hallaton Castle. I welcomed the re-emergence of utopian economic thinking and wondered at the disappearance of Adur Liberals. Snatching a crafty drink on the way home from a work event, I learnt that there had once been hares in Bloomsbury: After the opening of Woburn Walk, the newly laid paving stones became a magnet for the local ...

Before Fleetwood Mac were Fleetwood Mac, they were very much Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. This recording comes from that era, when they were one of the great British blues bands. Here Mick Fleetwood is on drums and John McVie on bass. The lead vocal is not by Green but by Jeremy Spencer. The presence of Danny Kirwan means they have three great guitarist on stage together. No wonder they sound so exciting. Now listen to Peter Green sing and play Man of the World.

Next week, Jair Bolsonaro will take over as President of Brazil. But already this tough-talking right-winger is setting the cat among the pigeons. At a meeting today with Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, the announcement was made that Brazil will follow the US lead by moving its embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. [...]

Second paragraph of third chapter: The researchers had collected all the Ebola data since the start of the epidemic and used it to calculate the expected number of new cases per day up to the end of October. They showed, for the first time, that the number of cases was not just increasing along a straight line: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Instead, the number was doubling like this: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. Each infected person was infecting, on average, two more people before dying. As a result, the number of new cases per day was doubling every three ...

Second paragraph of third chapter: A few entries earlier, though, [in Roger Taylor's April 1970 diary] the group was considering another name, Build Your Own Boat, for which Roger had designed a logo. The drummer shook his head at the memory. 'Thank God that idea was abandoned.' A kind relative, having seen my review of Bohemian Rhapsody, decided that I needed this for Christmas, and she was right. It's not terribly deep - a 200-page survey of Freddie Mercury's life and career, lavishly illustrated, doesn't have a lot of space to get into profound analysis of what he and his ...

This is the first of what will be a weekly round-up of news stories, for which I will offer cheers or jeers (and sometimes even tears). The concept is a straightforward one - I hope you enjoy it! Cheers to Lib Dems Zuffar Haq and Molly Rennie - not for receiving an MBE but for the decades of service for which they have rightly been recognised. Cheers to Neville Southall, the former Everton goalkeeper who has been on twitter helping people with mental health-related problems feel better about themselves over the festive period - and working to raise awareness of ...

Day 2, and a pleasant breakfast awaited. I enjoy breakfast, especially if it involves pork, and our hotel does this to a sufficiently high standard, with proper bacon and rather decent sausages. The service here is thorough, and friendly, which helps. We weren't in any hurry, as the morning was set aside for proper relaxation - I was booked in for a sea salt exfoliation and foam massage in the hammam. And yes, it is a proper hammam, with marble, and sinks with buckets, something I'm quite intrigued by, despite having never spent any serious time in Turkey. It was, ...

Sat, 12:19: This is awful. It was a tremendously moving statue, a man on his own in Kossuth Square, wearing his trademark hat,... https://t.co/kMJXAE9nES Sat, 12:25: RT @Freedland: Distraught to hear of the death of Amos Oz, a guiding light to all those who longed for a just Israel, living in peace with... Sat, 12:56: RT @jonworth: I set out to make a diagram to explain what might happen next in #Brexit It ended up... being rather complex! Views on this... Sat, 13:05: RT @jamesrbuk: When your tone on immigration is so bad that *The Sun* is calling it out ...

Since this site started in 2009, I've been keeping an eye on which is the most popular blog post with readers. It's a little trip down memory lane, showing how my own interests and my audience has evolved over time. Here's the latest round-up: 2018: Jeremy Corbyn's views on Brexit: a long held stance on Europe – originally written purely for myself to get information together in one place, it's turned out to be a quite a hit. Due much more I'm sure, to Jeremy Corbyn's own prevarications, than to my own efforts. 2017: How Theresa May could lose the ...

As the Guardian reports, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, has declared the rising number of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel a "major incident", as campaigners and charities warned of increasing desperation among those attempting to make the journey. Two more inflatable boats carrying 12 men from Syria and Iran were intercepted on Friday, adding to the 82 migrants detained trying to cross the Channel since Christmas Day, prompting Javid to appoint a gold commander to deal with the growing crisis and to ask for an urgent call with his French counterpart to discuss the issue. Meanwhile, some MPs ...

Beck came to fame in 1994 when the video for his song "Loser" went into heavy MTV rotation in America. It is a sort of novelty tune, a kind of slacker white guy hop hop thing that seemed to accidentally capture the spirit of the times with its chorus of "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me". Beck created the song as a joke and thought it was mediocre. No wonder: Beck's real calling was as a folk singer to rival any in the history of the genre. This isn't historical revisionism or even a lone opinion. ...

If you go to the shop and buy an iron, say, you expect it to work and for any manufacturer's claims or guarantees to stand. You are entering into a contract that can't be mucked around with. I should emphasise at this point that I would never buy an iron. The quality of my life improved immeasurably when I gave up ironing. But that's beside the point. You wouldn't stand for the manufacturer contacting you a few weeks' later telling you that you had to pay another £20 for the iron, or reducing the guarantee period. Yet this is exactly ...